.... ... ,- 7 - a" OFf E PAIX 0 . ------- --..... = .... deJaneiro remain unsolved riod. "Stray bullets" are said to kill or wound at least one person every day. By any ordinary calctÙus, public security in Rio de Janeiro is a disaster. "Rio is one of the very few cities in the world where you have whole areas con- trolled by armed forces that are not of the state," Alfredo Sirkis, a prominent Rio politician who is also a former guerrilla, said. "Anyone of the drug gangs in the smallest favela of Rio today has more weapons than we ever had," Sirkis added. 'We had basically one rifle, two machine guns, and a pair of grenades. And with those we had the state in our thrall." He shook his head. "But nobody wants to make revolution anymore. What these people with the guns want today is their immediate share of the consumption ctÙ- ture. It's so childish, and morally childish, and they kill like children, too-like in a kids' war game." If they ever acquired an ideology, they cotÙd threaten the state, he said. "For now, they are a totally en- tropic and anarchic group of young peo- ple who have figured out how to get what they want, which is, basically, clothing, d " cars, an respect. Indeed, what has happened in Rio applies, in varying degrees, throughout Latin America-most notably in Mex- ico, Guatemala, EI Salvador, and Co- lombia. Two decades after the collapse of Communism, the region's Marxist guer- rillas have disappeared, only to be re- placed by violent drug mafias. Sirkis, who is in his fourth term on Rio's city council, is a tall, rangy man of fifty-eight with a mop of fair hair. His parents were Polish Jews who immi- grated to Brazil after surviving the Ho- locaust. Sirkis was born in Rio. As a student in the late sixties, he joined the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard, an urban guerrilla group. Sirkis robbed sev- eral banks and, in separate incidents, helped kidnap the Swiss and German Ambassadors to Brazil. (The diplomats were freed unharmed after the military regime agreed to release a total of a hundred and ten political prisoners.) In 1971, as his comrades were being hunted down and killed, Sirkis fled the country. He spent almost nine years in exile, in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Lis- bon, returning after the military issued an amnesty. Sirkis went on to repudiate political violence in a best-selling book, "Os Carbonários," published in 1980. He is now an environmental activist and a leader of Brazil's Green Party, under whose banner he ran for Presi- dent, in 1998. On July 10th, one of Sirkis's son's best friends, a twenty-two-year-old uni- versity student, was murdered in Rio. His body was found in a taxi; he and the driver had both been shot; the student's sneakers were missing. Sirkis wrote a despondent letter to the editor in which he noted that this was an event of such banality that it had not even merited a news story. He told me, "The percent- age of crimes solved here in Rio is ridic- ulous-ninety per cent of the homicides go unresolved." Part of the blame went to Brazil's "politically correct culture," he said. "It's all Scandinavian talk in an Iraqi reality. Rio is completely schizo- phrenic. Everybody's very p.c.-all this violence is seen as coming from some injustice. At the same time, they'd like the favelas to be atomized, à la Buck Rogers, with a Disintegrator." Sirkis likens the spread of Rio's gang culture to AI Qgeda's appeal to disen- franchised youths in Muslim societies. "There is a culture that permits the constant reproduction of younger and younger recruits," he said. "It's a kind of se]f-affirmation. You have a social situa- tion that generates a certain kind of per- son and creates an example that is emu- lated by the boys who are young, and that example is a trafficker with his AR-15 and his Nike shoes. It's a way to become a man. The girls notice him and he can fight his enemies, who are youths like him. It gives them the sentiment of allegiance." Every year, the gangsters got younger; now some were as young as ten. It was "like a Middle Ages phenomenon, feu- dalism and warlordism without any pur- pose other than living day to day," Sirkis said. "It's a low-intensity, nonideological . " Insurgency. N ot long after Fernandinho took control of Ilha, he and Gil-the two call themselves the "LG gang" (for their nicknames Lopes and Gil)-began making headlines in Rio's newspapers. Fernandinho's generation of bandidos like to party. Gang chiefs are major pro- moters of funk carioca, or Brazilian gang- sta rap. On weekends, they throw bailes funk, street parties attended by youths from outside the favela-from 0 asfalto, "the asphalt," as the legally constituted parts of the city are known-and hire d.j.s. They provide beer, and sell drugs, mostly cocaine and marijuana, in great quantities. Fernandinho has been filmed partying with his "soldiers," drinking, singing, and bragging about how he dis- patched his enemies. At a baile funk in 2005, he rapped: Tie him up, get him down, Go on and chop this queer. Bring the sharp axe, Send him to Hell. Now you'll see, LG has no mercy. Get the axe down on him, THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 5, 2009 51